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Intellectual-Biographical Sketch

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Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp

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Abstract

In this chapter, I endeavour to sketch Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp’s intellectual biographies before their encounter in 1973. The chapter then deals with their joint educational-philosophical effort to develop the Philosophy for Children (P4C) curriculum and the related educational philosophy. The establishment of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) in 1974 is one of the key results of Lipman and Sharp’s cooperation, which included academic research and teaching, teacher education, and disseminating P4C nationally and internationally.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Lipman was to receive his bachelor’s degree in 1948 (Lipman, 2012, 23).

  2. 2.

    Lipman did not succeed in publishing this interesting paper, but fortunately a hard copy under the title The Concept of the Schema is kept in the IAPC archive (Lipman, 1948). This text provided material for both Lipman’s doctoral dissertation and in his first academic publications.

  3. 3.

    Wynona Moore was the first woman of African-American origins to be elected to the Senate (1971), and her twenty-seven years of service made her the Senate’s longest-serving member at the time of her death (1999). The couple had two children, Karen and Will, born respectively in 1959 and 1960. Will died of cancer at the age of twenty-four. Eventually, Lipman married Theresa (Teri) Smith in 1974.

  4. 4.

    A copy of Arendt’s reply to Lipman dated 30 March 1959 is stored in the IAPC’s archive at Montclair State University (Arendt, 1959).

  5. 5.

    This pilot experiment was the embryonic form of the “New Jersey Test of Reasoning Skills” developed a decade later by Virginia Shipman, the senior research psychologist of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), Princeton (NJ), with support from the Division of Research, Planning and Evaluation of the New Jersey Department of Education (IAPC, 1987b; Lipman et al., 1977–1980, 217–224; Shipman, 1983a, 1983b).

  6. 6.

    In 1994, Montclair State College was renamed Montclair State University.

  7. 7.

    Although the journal issue containing the succinct report of the conference discussion is dated before the event, it actually appeared the following year, in 1974 (Lipman, 1993a, 37).

  8. 8.

    In 1992, Lipman and Sharp conceived of a doctoral programme in philosophy (Ph.D.) with specialisation in Philosophy for Children and wrote an “informal recommendation for the establishment of a Ph.D. program in P4C” (IAPC, 1992). However, they afterwards changed their mind and in 1996 required the institution of a doctoral course in Education (Ed.D.) with concentration in Pedagogy and specialisation in Philosophy for Children, directed by Sharp (1996). In 1998, the Ed.D. was included in the new academic programme.

  9. 9.

    For instance, specific contributions by Sharp include the focus on personhood, feminism, as well as the aesthetic, corporeal, spiritual, religious, imaginative, and ecologic relevance of the community of philosophical inquiry, which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapters.

  10. 10.

    More on the results of these experiments will be said in Chap. 4.

  11. 11.

    The in-depth analysis of a P4C dialogic session will be carried out in Chap. 4.

  12. 12.

    Additionally, the IAPC archive also contains other unpublished novels, such as Lipman’s Ashaka (“adult novel, prison population”, dated 1985) and Relations (“Adult novel; undergraduates, prospective teachers”, dated 1972), and Sharp’s Why Should I Care? (s.d.) and Mieke (s.d.).

  13. 13.

    On Matthew’s relationship with Lipman and Sharp’s P4C, see Matthews (1994, 3–9), Gregory & Laverty (2022).

  14. 14.

    Such was the importance of these teacher-training workshops that at a meeting organised by the UNESCO in 1998, Lipman declared that “[w]e cannot lose the paradigm of the community of inquiry that Mendham and San Cristobal represent without pre-adults philosophy being struck a serious blow” (UNESCO, 1999, 78). San Cristóbal de Las Casas was the Mexican city, where, thanks to the support of the IAPC and Ann Sharp, Eugenio Echeverria had founded the “Centro Latinoamericano de Filosofía para Niños” in 1993 (http://www.celafin.org).

  15. 15.

    In 2004, among other activities, Sasseville promoted a TV series focused on children doing philosophy, which became the text for an online introductory course in P4C for teachers (https://philoenfant.org/serie-documentaire/).

  16. 16.

    An important UNESCO research paper on Philosophy: A School of Freedom, published in 2007, pays due homage to Lipman and Sharp’s educational philosophy and P4C curriculum.

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  1. Escola de Educação e Humanidades, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil

    Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo

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Correspondence to Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo .

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Franzini Tibaldeo, R. (2023). Intellectual-Biographical Sketch. In: Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24148-2_1

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